Winter Park continued from page 9 Back in the late ’30s, George Cranmer, then the director of the Denver Department of Parks and Improvement, had a vision: He wanted to create a winter sports park for Denver, which already owned parks in the mountains outside of the city. Skiing had been popular in the state since the Hot Sulpher Springs Winter Sports Car- nival debuted in 1912; Howelsen Hill outside of Steamboat Springs became Colorado’s fi rst area with a lift in 1915. Cranmer wanted Denver to get in on the game. As he began looking at options, he studied the Jones Pass area on the east side of Ber- thoud Pass as well as the West Portal area just west of the Moffat Tunnel, which had been fi nished in 1928, allowing trains to go through the Continental Divide rather than over it. That site won out because of the easy access through the tunnel. Cranmer arranged for the city to swap replaced as parks director. By then, his pet project was generating just $9,000 a year, which wasn’t enough to cover needed im- provements to infrastructure. That’s when wealthy Denverites, many of them members of the elite Colorado Arlberg Club based at Winter Park, stepped up to help. In 1950, they formed the Winter Park Recreational Association, which took over management of the ski area. As part of the deal, the city gave the WPRA $175,000 — the last money it would ever give Winter Park — to improve the facility, and the WPRA had to look elsewhere for another $200,000 needed for upgrades. People who cared about Cram- ner’s vision, including several WPRA board members, guaranteed the loans for the money needed to maintain the ski area. Since then, the WPRA has continued to hold the U.S. Forest Service permit as an agent of the city. “What’s nice is that keeps the City of Den- ver as an ultimate owner,” DeFrange notes. The WPRA hired Steve Bradley as ex- “We have done upgrades,” she says, “but a lot of the existing infrastructure is still some from the original snowmaking system in the mid-’70s. We were pretty pioneering; at that time, there weren’t a lot of ski areas making snow. But we’ve lagged a little bit since. We’re refocusing and making a big investment in the next, I would say, three to fi ve years.” Gerald Groswold took over as the WPRA director in 1975 and oversaw more expan- sions, into Vasquez Ridge and Parsenn Bowl, high-altitude alpine skiing accessed by the highest six-passenger chairlift in North America. By the resort’s fi ftieth anniver- sary, in 1990, Winter Park’s 106 trails on 1,325 skiable acres were attracting 924,000 annual skier visits. But for many ski resorts, the big action was moving off the slopes. In 1994, as other ski areas began focusing on real estate developments, the WPRA started renegotiating the terms of its agree- ment with the city. The U.S. Forest Service members of Denver City Council argue that the city didn’t sell the land at all, and that Denver can take back possession of Winter Park at any time because it retained reversion rights. In fact, under the current agreement, in 2078 any land that the WPRA hasn’t sold will revert back to the city in title. And in the meantime, according to Liz Orr, chief administrative officer for the WPRA, the city could decide it wants to take back the unsold land at any point. “For a practical, ongoing basis, the WPRA owns the land, but we only own it as an agent for the City and County of Denver,” she explains. DeFrange took over management of the resort shortly after the new agreement was signed. He recognized that Winter Park would have to change if it was going to keep up with the other ski areas in the state. Resorts were transitioning from fi xed-grip lifts to high-speed detachable lifts that could carry more people, he recalls. And people were looking for more amenities at the base, includ- ing retail shops, lodging and vacation homes. Trains were far more familiar sights than snowcats when Winter Park opened in 1940. 10 some land that it owned near the tiny town of Parshall farther west in Grand County with the U.S. Forest Service for 88.9 acres adjacent to the West Portal. He also acquired a permit from the Forest Service that secured 6,400 adjacent acres of land for winter sports and recreational development. That permit is still held by the City and County of Denver, and over the years, the permit area has expanded to nearly 7,500 acres, according to Winter Park spokesperson Jen Miller. In 1938, Bob Balch became the fi rst man- ager of the in-the-works sports park, whose name was changed from West Portal to Winter Park in December 1939, just one month before it offi cially opened in Janu- ary 1940 with two rope tows and ten trails. The grand-opening festivities included a winter carnival, modeled after the one in Hot Sulphur Springs. World War II slowed interest in Winter Park, though, and in 1947, Cranmer was ecutive director in 1950, when the park saw 10,000 visitors a year. Even as other ski areas started popping up across Colorado, Winter Park kept growing. In 1969, it obtained the permit for more Forest Service land and also leased land from the Arlberg Club to create Mary Jane, an adjunct to Winter Park that opened in 1975. Bradley, who reportedly was not a fan of moguls, had invented the Bradley Packer, a precursor to the snowcats that help smooth the mountain as well as tour visitors around the resort; there’s still an old one hanging in a lodge at Winter Park. Still, he pushed the expansion of Mary Jane, known for its bump runs. The bumps did have many fans, and the number of annual visitors to Winter Park grew from 359,000 in 1974 to 494,700 in 1975. In 1976, the resort introduced another improvement: a $1.2 million snowmaking system that’s getting a signifi cant upgrade this year, Miller notes. wanted to aggregate land in the area that was held by many owners, and the WPRA was eager to develop some of that property. The new deal, which Denver City Council approved in 1996, authorized the WPRA to enter into real estate transactions, convey- ing the ninety acres at the base that the city owned to the WPRA. As part of the agree- ment, the WPRA agreed to pay the city $2 million annually to be used for capital improvements for the Denver parks system. The transfer of the resort title was contro- versial. Denver can’t sell park land without a vote of the people, but a judge in Grand County ruled that Winter Park had never been incorporated as an offi cial city park. Kevin Flynn, now a member of Denver City Council, covered the story for the Rocky Mountain News; he maintains that many councilmembers didn’t realize at the time that they were effectively selling the resort. That’s a slippery slope, though. Other “Frankly, the way we were structured at that time, we didn’t have the ability to put together the equity it would take to upgrade the mountain side of the resort with lifts and snowmaking and potentially additional ter- rain and additional amenities on the moun- tain, and we didn’t have the ability to develop the base area,” DeFrange says. The WPRA saw what was happening in Vail, where Vail Resorts could bring in private investors and build equity rather than just taking out a loan with the prop- erty as collateral. It also noted how Copper Mountain and Steamboat were expanding while owned by private entities. So in late 1999, the WPRA began working with the city to revise its agreement. Orr was the manager of the city’s Of- fi ce of Projects when the WPRA took its concerns about not being able to make its $2 million annual payments, much less be- ing able to generate continued on page 12 NOVEMBER 3-9, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS CARL FREY / COURTESY OF WINTER PARK AND ALTERRA MOUNTAIN RESORTS
